


Breaking the Silence

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: Keith's Binder [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Blood, Fighting, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Keith has never been rick rolled, Not much just a bloody nose, Past Abuse, Trans Keith (Voltron), Vomit, how, how have you lived such a blessed life, rick astley - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 05:15:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10404741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Keith and Allura aren't exactly on speaking terms after he comes out as galra.  Pidge, and everyone else, is VERY MUCH AWARE OF THAT.  No one really expects things to come to a head, but when they do, Pidge is recruited to talk Keith down--the rabbit hole of past trauma.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Sickfic_Sideblog](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Sickfic_Sideblog/gifts).



> So... @thesickficsideblog on tumblr wrote me a cute little fic, which you can find here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10394334
> 
> The prompt for that one was this mess: “I think my favorite is keith being a silent broody mess and someone trying to figure out his deal. lol someone annoying keith when he wants to be alone until he suddenly has to puke is one of my favorite things….I think [caretaker pidge is] fucking sweet and cute as hell usually. Especially if she’s super snarky but gets softer when she knows he’s really not feeling good.”
> 
> And so I responded, as I do, with another fic! Yikes! Enjoy!

The night Pidge and Keith talked, really talked, for the first time, Pidge finally felt like she had the last few answers to the questions she felt lingering after the paladins formed Voltron.  They were one as Voltron, yes.  But certain bits and pieces, especially the ones that were either underlying or all-consuming, were hard to pinpoint to a specific paladin.  She had never quite been able to suss out the quiet alertness that reverberated right in the back, the place that would exist just above the back of the neck if Voltron were a human.  It was a huge piece of Voltron’s shared mind that kept them tense enough to stay in sync, and sharp enough to react fast as one.  She’d never felt it ramp up quite to anxiety, much less to the kind of anxiety that could strangle a person, but when she was alone in her bed after a heavy battle, she would come up with theories about how it could happen.  After that night, she had the proof that she was right.

She left Keith’s room a cramped mess from leaning over him and rubbing his stomach, coaching him through the painful thoughts.  He’d only thrown up that one time, but she could still see the ache inside of him long after he started talking.  He’d said a lot of things, and she understood a lot of them.  Some of the ones about blood, for instance.  Her house on earth and the people in it were good people, and she would die for any of them.  Some of her extended family… not so much.  She had experience with knowing that you were related to someone who could be downright vile sometimes.  But where she could argue with her grandma whenever she said something racist, get up and leave the room in a huff if she wouldn’t listen, even, Keith was just… stuck.  Stuck with the fact that his blood was almost entirely their mortal enemy.

Some of the things he was worried about were just silly, though.  Why would he think that his digestion would change just because he LEARNED he was galra?  He was galra the whole time— _that wasn’t how it worked_. 

Since that night, however, she’d been able to literally see when he was thinking bad thoughts.  It was usually when they were in the control room, and always when Allura was there.  His eyebrows would start to pinch together, then he’d avert his eyes, and eventually he’d cross his arms over his middle.  Shiro, bless him, noticed her noticing and made a point to change the topic whenever it happened.  But that wasn’t going to solve the main issue—they all knew it.  Allura was charged up with a bone-deep, unfathomable fury that reflected the cries of her long dead planet like a mirror.  No one, especially not reckless, impulsive, moody Keith, was going to be able to fix that any time soon.

That was why when, a week later, Pidge wasn’t at all surprised to get a knock at her door.

“Pidge,” Shiro said through the metal, before she could even blink away the intense focus she’d had on her laptop.  “I need your help.  _Right now_.”

The urgency in her leader’s voice was overt enough that she was propelled out of bed.  She hit the button on the door to find him with his hand massaging his temples, his shoulders slumped with exhaustion.  She looked around suspiciously, but no one else was there, no Keith or Lance or even Hunk.  “Whats… up—?” she started to ask.  He was already beckoning her to walk with him.

“There’s been an… incident in the control room,” he said, his pace brisk. 

Pidge quickly stepped up beside him, working to keep up.  “Ominous,” she noted.

With a little sliver of a smile, Shiro shrugged.  “Not the word I would use.  Volatile, maybe.”

“So the problem is Keith, right?  What happened?  Did he go Hunk in the control room?”

“Not so much.”  Shiro turned a corner.  This was… not the way to central command.  Pidge stuck a little closer to Shiro’s side, as if getting closer to him might clear up all the questions she had just a little bit faster.  Curiosity was an insatiable thing.  “I was there with Allura and Keith came in, yes, but… can you hear it yet?”

Pidge squinted at Shiro, then concentrated on her hearing.  She didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.  They were nearing the tower of the castle where all the old sleeping quarters of the Altean royalty were located.  Coran and Allura both had lived there back in the day, but Coran had relocated since waking up.  Allura, on the other hand, was still there.  And… Pidge listened harder.  There was… oh no, was that yelling?  It definitely was, echoing around from several different angles.  It was faint and distorted enough that she couldn’t get a grasp of the words, but the tone… Keith was in the upper registers of UPSET.

“You hear him now, don’t you,” Shiro said, all signs of humor fading fast, and he started to move into a run.  “I’m still not sure what got them started but it got heated very fast and I can’t comfort both of them at the same time.  The princess banished Coran, but I can talk to her.  I need you to talk Keith down and _get him away to cool off._ “  His voice was almost utilitarian as he gave the orders, but the tightness of his back as Pidge followed close behind gave away exactly how much he hated the thought of them tearing each other apart.

They rounded a final corner, and Keith’s voice suddenly became ten times louder.  He was pacing in short, jerking lines back and forth down the hallway, his face clutched in his hands, which dug into his bangs without mercy.  “—just come out and fucking tell me whether or not I should stay here!  Obviously I’m not wanted, I figured I could take it for the sake of Voltron but if you really want me gone then _I can be gone just give the order_ —“ he was saying, and as those words left his lips, he curled up a little around his middle.

“— _we aren’t talking about this right now, and if you are so decided on hearing my opinions maybe you should ask me about breaches of etiquette_ —” Allura responded, and her voice was so wound up with emotions that Pidge couldn’t even unfurl a dominant one, let alone the rest.  Pidge wasn’t sure exactly what she expected.  Some gross scene, maybe—the floor coated in vomit or something, or the two of them rolling around on the floor, throwing punches.  The actuality was pretty tame in comparison to what her mind came up with.  Well, if ‘tame’ included Keith and Allura literally screaming at each other through Allura’s bedroom door. 

Shiro immediately went to Keith and reached for him, calling, “Princess, please—“

“— _I’m not the one who won’t walk away_!” she yelled, voice cracking.  She was definitely in tears.  “ _Take him and leave me be_!”

“—why can’t you just come out here and say that you think I’m a monster?” Keith snarled right back, and when he raised his face it was red with blood. 

Shiro didn’t flinch, but Pidge did, because _what happened_?  Shiro just cupped Keith’s face for a moment, trying meet his eyes over his bloody nose.  “Keith, Keith, listen to me.  You need to go with Pidge.  Are you hearing me?”

“Just give me an answer!” Keith said, wrenching away to lean around Shiro’s shoulder.

“ _Just get him away from me!_ ” came the reply.

Keith sucked in a breath to say something else.  Realizing that she’d been just standing there staring, Pidge shook herself.  She had a job to do.  She gave a quick nod to Shiro before she stepped up and took his place.  A grateful expression momentarily gracing his face, Shiro sidled up to the door and started speaking more quietly to it, trying to find the spaces between Keith’s angry words to talk to her.  Keith’s face was flushed red with anger and more than a little hurt, and some quick calculations told Pidge that if he decided to really put up a fight she probably wouldn’t be able to do much to stop him short of pulling out her bayard and lassoing him.  For a moment she considered hitting him in the stomach—she didn’t miss the way his hand was hovering there like it was bothering him—but she decided that was too cruel.  A hit like that would only be warranted if someone broke one of her gadgets.  She’d have to try something else.  Who knew, though, maybe if she caught him at just the right moment she could surprise him into listening to her. 

Just as he paused for another breath, Pidge entered his space, stepping on his feet in the process to boost herself as close to his face as she could.  Blood was still dripping from his nose, and now she was close enough to smell it.  The details blurred around her—his sweaty hair, stuck up at all the wrong angles; Shiro’s calming voice floating on the air; the brush of Keith’s pants against hers as his knees bent, aiding in his body’s attempt to lean away from her; his feet rocking under her.  Keith’s eyes flickered to hers for just a moment, and that moment was enough.  While he was distracted and trying to move back, she grabbed him by the ear and _yanked_ , bringing him down to her level.

“Keith Kogane,” she said, holding him there.  Shiro was still murmuring to Allura, and without the princess yelling back, Keith seemed to be deflating a little.  He finally locked eyes with Pidge, his face etched with frustration and the very beginnings of guilt.  Pidge sighed.  “Okay, now that I have your attention.  This?  Isn’t good.  It’s time to take a step back.  Let’s take a walk, okay?”

With a swat, he knocked her hand away, rocking back onto his heels.  For another long second his eyes bore into Allura’s door, and Pidge got ready to summon her bayard.  She could feel the Look from Shiro even with her back turned.  She’d seen it so many times that she could almost reconstruct it herself—the dry, unamused look of disappointment.  With a face that exposed his extra-sharp canines (a trait not uncommon in humans but universal in galra, Pidge’s mind supplied unnecessarily), Keith spun and strode down the hall.

Well, there was that.  Pidge contemplated the pros and cons of going after him.  A little dejectedly, she decided it was probably best to make sure he didn’t just go to the training deck and get himself hurt.  She took a step after him.

“Pidge,” Shiro called, and Pidge turned back.  It looked like he’d been watching to see what she would do.  “…Thanks,” he said after a small moment, with a teeny gift of a smile.  Sobs were starting to creep faintly through the door—his hand, the flesh one, was pressed against the metal like he could sooth Allura by soothing it.  Pidge shot off a salute and a sympathetic expression to Shiro before she twirled and followed Keith.  Yeah, she could take care of Keith.  The moment with Shiro cemented her resolve once more.  Damn him, how was he such a good leader?

That moment, however small, was just long enough for Keith to turn a corner and disappear.  It took her longer to find him than she would have liked, but at least he wasn’t having a showdown with a robot to make himself feel better.  He probably knew that was where she would look first.  With a frustrated sigh, Pidge tried his room, then the showers, and then the kitchen.  After a moment of consideration, she decided to check the lion’s hangars, with pit stops at every source of water between point A and point B because the kid had to clean his face _somehow_.  In one of the bathrooms in the lower levels she found his jacket, bloody.  He’d probably used it as a rag, and then had still been upset enough to throw it in a corner instead of taking it to the laundry pods.  Getting hot.  Picking up her pace, Pidge readied herself for anything.

Again, she was slightly underwhelmed.  This time, it was because he wasn’t anywhere in sight.  Frowning, she cocked her head to listen as she walked past the first lions.  Their dark eyes seemed to watch her, sentinels in the night.  She listened harder.  There wasn’t… a sound, exactly.  It was like the hum of a powered-up lion—the kind of mechanical noise that was too low to hear with your ears so you felt it vibrating in your lungs instead.  “Keith?” she called.

“You didn’t have to check up on me.”

Bingo.  Pidge snorted back at the hoarse voice that echoed around the room.  “Of course I didn’t.  So, hotshot, you want to tell me what’s up with you?”

“I… I just…”  He sighed and went silent. 

Pidge kept walking, waiting until Red was in her sights to make another verbal check.  “So… how’d you get the bloody nose?”

It took him a moment to answer.  “…Allura.”

Hm.  Altean strength noted.  “And she went off on you because…”

Biting the bait, Keith groaned.  “No, it was my fault.  I got in her face and I guess that’s not what you do when you’re arguing with Royalty or whatever.  Coran was ready to restrain me, but she beat him to it.  She elbowed me in the face.”

Badassery noted, as well.  By now Pidge was pretty sure that Keith was sitting in the little nook where Red’s curling tail rested snug against the wall, sheltered beneath a loop of lion mech.  Red wasn’t on, really, but something inside of her was turning with slow, steady beats, like an enormous mechanical heart.  Pidge wondered offhand if she was doing it on purpose.  Brushing aside all of the little notes and calculations that accumulated on her mental whiteboard, Pidge ducked down to peek under the tail.  “Hey,” she said quietly.

He was curled up tight, an arm wrapped around his stomach and his head between his knees.  Even in the dark little space she could see flecks of blood on his arms here and there.  She put a hand on his back experimentally and wasn’t surprised to find it clammy with sweat.

“I should really go.  I should leave,” he mumbled at the ground.

“Hey.  You were the one who convinced me to stay once upon a time—you think I’m about to let you go off on your own?”

He wasn’t listening.  “Should have learned my lesson a long time ago.  God, I’m so stupid… why do I let things happen all over again?”

Pidge blinked.  That was a new one.  “Again?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.  This… wasn’t going very well.

Filling the silence had worked a little bit last time.  It was worth it to give it a try.  “Hey so… being in the hangar reminded me, have I ever told you the story about the first time I tried to modify Green?”

Nothing. 

Pidge swallowed.  Helping this time might be harder than she thought, but damn if she wasn’t going to give it her best shot.  “It was kind of funny, actually.  Imagine a lion with the body language of Lance that one time he saw that alien’s pet scorpion-thing.  She looked scared and just a _touch_ offended, and oh my god, it took me three hours to convince her to let go of the ceiling support struts and come back down to the ground.”

Pausing, Pidge felt Keith move under her hand.  He made a noise, something like a whimper.  Pidge ducked a little, trying to see his face.  Oh… he had a fist pressed to his mouth.

Instant panic drove through her chest.  She was pretty used to vomit, mostly because of Hunk, but something about being crammed into a small space in the dark with somebody who was about to be sick made her hackles rise.  “Hey, okay, let’s get you up—“

His gloved hand caught her wrist.  He was shaking.  “Pidge, I… really don’t feel good.”

“I know,” she said, trying not to let her desperation show.  “I know, Keith, I know.  Let’s go to a bathroom, okay?  Or at least find a trash—“

He didn’t even have time to let go of her before he hitched and vomit splattered on the floor.  Pidge screwed up her face.  Okay, that wasn’t so ba—she screwed it up further as he did it again.  He moaned, core muscles jumping.  He was so scrunched up around himself that she couldn’t see his stomach, let alone get in there to try and rub it, and with the way he was going she didn’t think it would let up any time soon.  She reached for her wrist, for her hairband and… it was gone.  Shoot, she’d left it in his hair the last time this happened.  It was probably lost in his drawer of gloves, which she was positive that he had somewhere.  What could she do?

The answer came to her slowly.  It was something her mom used to do.  She cleared her throat, preparing herself.  When she heard a lull in the puking, she leaned over Keith and started to brush his hair back, at the same time as she started humming.

It was the only song she could think of—Rick Astley.  Never gonna give you up.  It was ridiculous, a pathetic attempt at making him feel better, and there was no way it was going to work.  …Except it did.  With a few more hiccups, Keith quieted, his breath coming in soft pants.  His head steadied under her fingers.  He was still gross and sweaty, but he no longer had stomach contents coming up, which was a vast improvement.  He swallowed and sniffled, and then suddenly his back was straightening.

“Okay,” he said, his voice sounding even worse than it had after all the yelling.  “Sorry.  We can… let’s go, I’m okay.”

Pidge shook her head.  She paused her humming just long enough to snort, “Don’t believe you.”  Then she went right back to it, continuing to stroke through his fluffy hair, teasing it back into some semblance of neatness.

It took a while, but eventually the telltale tremors in his hands started to calm.  She’d had to repeat the song several times, which was making every cell in her body want to die, but it was helping.  He was resting back against the wall, his arms propped in his knees.  His head swayed gently with each pass of Pidge’s small fingers.  “I recognize that.  What is it?” he asked, his voice low so that it wouldn’t hurt.

Pidge finally leaned back.  “Have you never been rick rolled?” she asked, incredulous.  “You were either deprived as a child or blessed with nothingness.  I’m not sure which.”

He shrugged.  Pidge resolved to use this new information at a later date.

The ordeal of getting him up and back to his room was… well, an ordeal.  He was unsteady on his feet, coming down on the aftershocks of adrenaline and vomiting.  He was tracking puke all the way past the black lion, whose dead eyes seemed disapproving.  Halfway back up to their rooms, Pidge tried to get his arm around her shoulders, but accidentally headbutted him in the face in the process, which just caused his nose to start lazily leaking blood again.  “Too bad you abandoned your jacket,” Pidge said, joking.

That was a mistake.  Keith’s puppy eyes while his pale, sickly face was flecked with drying blood and he could barely speak louder than a whisper were KILLER.  They squabbled about how to get the jacket, with Keith insisting she leave him and meet him back upstairs (“No!  You THINK when you’re alone!  Don’t you pretend I don’t know what kind of mess you’ll get into!”).  Pidge only won by reminding him that if he met up with Shiro on his own he would have to have a Talk.  Together they meandered back down to the jacket, snatched it, and climbed all the way back up again.

Keith seemed ready to just flop into bed and sleep for a long, long time, but Pidge shoved his gangly knees aside, perching and holding a tissue out to him.  “Somehow I got the feeling that you need to get something else off your chest,” she said without preamble.  She wanted to get to sleep just as badly as he did.

The stiffness that took him over immediately was telling enough.  “Pidge… please.  I’m tired.”

“Yes.  And stressed.  And I know there’s something that’s eating you up.”

“No.  It’s not…” Keith groaned, squeezing his eyes shut.  Pidge immediately shifted to be sitting at his head.  The silence started to wear on the both of them—she could see his adam’s apple bobbing—so she did the only thing she could, and started to stroke his hair again.

“Please just… tell me.  It’ll make you feel better,” she sighed.

A measure of silence.  Two.  Then Keith started to talk.

“I never told you where I was before I went into the desert.”

“The garrison?”

“…No.  Yeah, but not directly before.  I was being fostered by this… family.  Out in Texas.  I went to the garrison because Shiro was there, and even if he was going to leave soon I just had to… I had to get out of there.  The family wasn’t bad, or anything, at least not at first, but… I was stupid.  I thought, hey, Keith, these people are so nice.  They tell you every night that they’ll love you no matter what happens.  The fostering agency probably told them to say that or whatever.  But I decided that I’d… tell them.”

“Tell them what?” Pidge asked.  She had reserved a small space in her mind just for the motion of running her fingers up and around his ear, down the back of his neck, out through the rest of the mullet fluff, repeat.  The rest of her was listening intently.

“That I… wasn’t a girl.”  His eyes flicked back toward her and away so quick that she couldn’t see what kind of emotion was in them.  “I was like you.  I had kept it a secret so long and I thought it was the right time to… just tell them.  So I did.”

Pidge breathed in as deeply as she could.  “And?” she said, voice barely shaking.

“And they didn’t like it.  They went quiet.  It was like… they knew the truth and they stopped seeing me as a person, just as this… mistake of nature.  They didn’t know what to do with me.  I’d go down to breakfast and no one would look at me, no one would… I couldn’t even ask a question, they would just say ‘go ask your teachers’ or give me one-word answers.  And I got so… so angry.  I had sent in an application to the garrison already, and I didn’t know if I was in or not but I just needed to get away from there.  So I ran away.”

“Oh,” Pidge breathed.  She was starting to see the real shape of this story.  “…You went back after the garrison, didn’t you.”

He sniffled.  “I thought… hey, Keith, you never know.  If you try again maybe things won’t be so bad.  You just took them by surprise the first time.  And they said… the cruelest things.  Compared me to… things I don’t want to think about.  Perverted things.  Like I was this dirty, dirty…”  His voice broke.  “Anyway.  I left, wandered for a while, and then I felt blue and I went searching for her.  And then all this.  And after everything that we’ve done, all the good and the… after all of it, it happened again.”

Keith was shaking again, but this time Pidge knew it was because there were tears streaking down his face.  She’d never seen him looking so small and hurt—no one except maybe Shiro had probably seen him like this.  Taking the utmost care, Pidge wiped a tear track from the bridge of his nose.  “You had to come out as galra, and Allura’s reaction reminded you of… that,” she supplied into the new silence, trying to keep her voice soft and inflectionless.

Keith jerked, covering his face and curling up.  “What am I supposed to do when they get quiet?  Just pretend it doesn’t hurt?  That I don’t know they’d rather I just… leave?  She couldn’t look me in the face and answer a navigation question, I-I just—I couldn’t do it again, I couldn’t live with the silence, I—“

“Shhh…”

He cried.  Pidge wasn’t sure if it was a good cry or not, but he was obviously exhausted enough that he couldn’t help it.  She didn’t know if it was okay to move his head to her lap, and he didn’t seem quite coherent enough to answer when she asked, so she just supplied as many tissues as she could find, tossing away the bloody ones when he was done.  Eventually, the blood, and the tears, came to a stop.  Then she tapped him on the shoulder, gesturing for him to sit up and get a hug.

“I know it hurts,” she whispered into his ear.  He clutched her tight.  “I know.  And I know you feel like you can’t tell anybody about this stuff, and that keeping it in makes you sick.  But hey, listen to me—Allura is one person, and even she still recognizes the good of the red paladin.  She’s trying to straighten it out in her mind.  She’ll do it eventually.  But until then, that’s her problem, okay?  You can keep being you, in all your transgalra weirdness.  The rest of us don’t mind.”

“…That sounds like something someone else told you,” Keith said.  He hadn’t let go yet, his cheek tucked against her hair.

“Yeah, actually.”  Pidge smiled, sad.  “My mom.”

That night, Pidge and Keith slept together on the floor of his room, back to back.  Pidge thought about sending Shiro a quick message, but she would have to get up, and honestly… keeping Keith company was more important.  Keith and his wariness of the world, the alertness that kept Voltron together and ready to defend, the anxiety that sometimes swallowed him whole.  Yeah, being where she was, left hand to his right, was where she needed to be.

That was cheesy.  Damn, she was tired.  Time to turn off. 

She was almost asleep when Keith started humming.  Never gonna give you up… never gonna let you down… never gonna run around and desert you…  “Curse my sleepy, emotion-riddled brain…” she mumbled to herself.  Rick Astley made it into her dreams. 


End file.
